are recommended to wear warm clothing. These floating Dubais, placeless and opulent, transport the cruiser through (literally) nowhere. The other sort of ship is attended to largely by the ‘robots’, colossal semi-automated cranes, with their additional skeleton crew of bored humans.
You can see the cranes in the distance from Mayflower Park, a windswept public space laid out in the 1960s by the City Architects’ Department that is (officially) the only publicly accessible stretch of the harbour. Pre-financial crisis, it was the mooted location for Avery Associates’ Spitfire Wing, an observation tower intended to mimic the aerodynamic form of the plane designed in the city, the only proposal for the waterfront to conjure the ‘Bilbao Effect’—or as the Echo calls it, ‘the wow factor’—though it seemed a fairly transparent attempt at one-upmanship with Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower. An article in the same paper in October 2008 claimed that it had been replaced by the ‘woe factor’, as almost all the new projects that had been announced or had received planning permission were cancelled or shelved. Since then, a couple have limped their way to completion, presumably representing ‘green shoots’. In response to all this, Tory council leader Royston Smith commented that ‘Southampton’s golden age will just have to be put back a couple of years’.15 In Mayflower Park, the wait for the golden age entails the no doubt temporary survival of some strange and beautiful artefacts—two shelters by Leon Berger in rubble stone with jagged concrete roofs, a tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright, which seem an efficient shelter for the cider-drinking youth that gather there.
Mayflower Park
My dad often took me, my brother and sister to Mayflower Park, to enjoy its now demolished playground, which included a concrete maze, aptly enough. Being a child of the eighties I was fairly obsessed with robots, specifically Transformers. Mum likes to tell the story about me coming home from nursery school claiming we’d been told about ‘this robot called God’ (well, how else to explain it?), and on Mayflower Park I would dream of robots in disguise. I was missing a trick, as they were a few yards from the park, in the containerized Western Dock. This vast dock complex was built in the 1930s on reclaimed land, to take the evermore ginormous cruise ships of the era such as the Queen Mary. In the 1980s its vastness meant that, unlike Liverpool or London, it could accommodate containerization with ease. It’s also damn hard to see, at least from the Southampton side of the River Test, because you’re not meant to see it. It’s an incredible sight, but it’s never going to be on Southampton City Council’s Heritage itinerary—and unless you have a pass, you won’t ever see it up close. The cranes induce the morbid thrill of seeing our replacements.
Ships seen from Mayflower Park
The difficulty in seeing the port should not surprise overmuch, as for all the drastic changes in port cities over the last few decades, docks were always heavily guarded places. The London Docks used to have a gigantic wall to keep out those not on business, a barrier which now exists in a less tangible form in the financial district of Docklands. In Southampton the exclusion is yet more subtle in that although the docks seem to have little effect on the town, they still exist, and are (or rather were until the crash) thriving. I went to the city’s main comprehensive school, and nobody I knew had parents who worked on the docks. More often, their parents’ jobs derived from the service industry in the centre, or from the Russell Group university in the suburban north. Yet beginning at the centre of town and straggling its way along the inner-city district of Freemantle, past Millbrook and ending at the edge of the New Forest, is the major cruise port and the second largest container port in Britain. Its success, size and centrality are matched only by its invisibility.
There are few places where you can gain any sense of it, let alone at its full scale, unless you’re lucky enough to have a tower-block flat in Millbrook, Shirley or Redbridge. You could look from the other side of Southampton Water (I’ve never done so—there be dragons) or, more interestingly, there is a bridge and a pathway which begins at Millbrook Railway Station. This is itself a strange remnant, one of those stations which receive about one train an hour that miraculously survived the Beeching Axe. Were you walking from my Mum’s house in Freemantle, you could see the container port start to rise above the terraces and flats, its arcing cranes softened by the winter light. The cruel scale and drama of the cranes make everything around seem petty.
As you walk through Freemantle towards the docks, past the recently closed British American Tobacco Factory, they loom incongruously above the terraces, steel arms hovering derisively over Salt & Battery Fish & Chips. The disassociation of industry and architecture after Modernism is spectacularly visible along the Western Docks, as most of the architecture built after the container port was established in 1969 is in the vernacular. Looking out onto the industrial cyber-architecture of the port, the flats and houses are utterly absurd, architecture placing its hands over its ears and eyes. Nothing has even attempted to exploit the drama of this place, which is again unsurprising, I suppose, as container ports are not seen as part of the city itself. Mostly they stand in out-of-the-way places like Felixstowe or Tilbury, rather than near the centre of medieval cities. So, there is only one way. You climb up the frighteningly unstable-seeming motorway bridge which leads to Millbrook station, and from here, equipped with zoom lens and/or binoculars, the port reveals itself at nearly its full extent. The neglect of the place is clear enough from the foliage that has draped itself around the concrete and steel of the station bridges, a mutant nature which is particularly virulent round here.
Walter Benjamin differentiated Communist Constructivist aesthetics from Fascist Futurist aestheticism by pointing out that the latter were merely interested in the look of technology, and had little interest in finding out how it worked, in mastering and applying it—it was instead a subject for a kind of technological nature painting. I don’t know how this port complex works, but I find it almost convulsively beautiful. Although my intent here is to examine what happens to a place when something like this is in its midst, it is important to work out how the port functions, to explain the networks of trade and power that keep it going. Here I can offer some minimal information, but not much else. Southampton Container Port is officially known as ‘DP World Southampton’. It is 51 per cent owned by DP World, which is itself owned by Dubai World, the insolvent state-run conglomerate. The other 49 per cent is owned by Associated British Ports, denationalized in the early 1980s and now largely owned by Goldman Sachs. That these institutions would have little interest in Southampton itself is again deeply unsurprising. Dubai World rationalized the port still further throughout the 2000s, introducing more automation and decimating the already tiny workforce. Their unimportance to the operation can be gleaned from the several industrial accidents at the container port over the last couple of years. In July 2009 one worker’s legs were crushed by a crane, and in March 2010 a 200ft crane collapsed, narrowly avoiding claiming any further victims.16
DP World Southampton, from Millbrook Station
Rather than being introduced in one confrontational Thatcherite stroke, containerization and the destruction of Southampton dock labour was gradual, until after a few decades robots practically outnumbered dockers. How to respond to these cranes, then—these complex, almost autonomous creatures, operated (or not) by something fleshy in their interior? How could we possibly have fought them? They promise a true liberation from work, one of the most visible pieces of evidence for the genuine possibility of an automated labour replacing us and letting us fish in the afternoon, philosophize in the evening and so forth. Yet instead servile service industry work replicated—needlessly, pointlessly—the old structure of forty hours (plus) a week and a pay cheque, this time with fewer rights, less bargaining power. How could we have used the robots?
We might at least have done something more interesting with them than this. The port transports cars, it transports consumer goods manufactured in the Special Economic Zones of the People’s Republic of China, and it piles up waste and scrap; the literal embodiment of an overwhelming